There’s a particular moment I’ve witnessed many times in my work, and I’ve come to think of it as a kind of turning point. Someone has been working hard, applying effort and intention to a situation that matters enormously to them, and it isn’t going the way they hoped. They’ve tried the obvious things, and then the less obvious things, and still the outcome remains stubbornly out of reach. And at some point, usually quietly, they say: I just feel like I have no control over any of this. What they mean, I think, is something true. But the word they’re using is getting in the way.
Control is a reasonable thing to want. It promises safety, predictability, the ability to protect what matters to you. In stable circumstances, a fair amount of it is actually available. You can control your schedule, your habits, your responses, the quality of your work, the care you bring to your relationships. These are real and meaningful forms of control, and exercising them tends to produce results you can count on. The problem arises when circumstances change in ways that put outcomes genuinely beyond your reach, and you continue organizing your effort around regaining control rather than recognizing that the game has shifted. At that point, the pursuit of control stops being a strategy and starts being a source of suffering. You’re measuring yourself against a standard that the situation itself has made unavailable, and every shortfall becomes further evidence that you’re failing.
What I find myself returning to, both in my clinical work and in Buddhist philosophy more broadly, is a distinction that doesn’t always get made clearly enough: the difference between control and influence. Control is binary. You either have it or you don’t, and in genuinely unstable circumstances, you often don’t. Influence is something else entirely. It’s present even when control isn’t. It operates at the margins, in the small decisions and consistent actions that shape a situation over time without determining its outcome. It doesn’t promise the result you want. What it offers instead is something more durable: the knowledge that you are not simply a passive recipient of whatever happens next. That you are, in some meaningful sense, a participant.
This distinction matters clinically because the belief that you have no power, which is what people usually mean when they say they have no control, tends to produce a very specific kind of paralysis. It’s not laziness or avoidance. It’s the logical response to a conclusion: if nothing I do makes a difference, then doing nothing and doing something are equivalent. Why exhaust yourself? The exhaustion of helplessness is real, and it feeds on itself. But the conclusion driving it is almost always inaccurate. People in genuine crisis, navigating circumstances they did not choose and cannot fully manage, still make choices every day that matter. They decide how to talk to the people they love. They decide whether to ask for help, and from whom. They decide what to pay attention to and what to let go, at least for today. These choices don’t resolve the situation. But they are not nothing. They are, in fact, the actual available material of agency, and they tend to go unrecognized precisely because they don’t look like control.
There’s a practice I sometimes suggest that sounds almost insultingly simple, but turns out to be clarifying in ways that more elaborate approaches often aren’t. I ask someone to make two lists. The first is everything about their situation they cannot change: the facts on the ground, the decisions already made, the circumstances outside their reach. The second is everything they can still affect, however modestly: a conversation they could have, a boundary they could set, a small action they’ve been postponing. The first list is usually longer, at least at first, and making it explicit tends to produce a kind of relief rather than despair. There’s something settling about naming what’s actually true, rather than continuing to struggle against it. The second list, however modest, almost always contains more than people expect. And it’s in that list that the work lives. This isn’t about positive thinking, or making peace with circumstances that genuinely warrant resistance, or pretending that the things you cannot control don’t matter. Some of them matter enormously. What it’s about is something more precise: redirecting the energy that’s been spent on what isn’t available toward what actually is. Not because that guarantees a better outcome. But because it’s the only approach that keeps you genuinely engaged with your life, rather than at war with its conditions. In my experience, that engagement is both the means and something close to the end. It’s what growth through difficulty actually looks like, from the inside.